Automatic Part-of-Speech Tagging of Arabic Text

1. School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING Automatic Part-of-Speech Tagging of Arabic Text العَنْوَنَةُ الآلِيَّةُ لِنُصُوصِ اللُّغَةِ العَرَبِيَّةِ Majdi Sawalha sawalha@comp.leeds.ac.uk Supervisor Dr. Eric Atwell eric@comp.leeds.ac.uk

2. School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Outline: • Introduction • Research focus and questions • A word about Arabic Language • Arabic Language Corpora • Gold standard for evaluation • Arabic Morphological Analysers and Stemmers • Prior-Knowledge broad-lexical resource • Hybrid Part-of-Speech tagger of Arabic language

3. School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING Introduction • What is Part of Speech Tagging? • What is a tag? • What is the tagsets? • Our Aim How to widen the scope of Arabic Part-of-Speech tagging, to develop a system which can process Arabic text in wide range of formats, domains, and genres of both vowelized and non-vowelized text ?

4. School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING Research focus and questions How to widen the scope of Arabic Part-of-Speech tagging, to develop a system which can process Arabic text in wide range of formats, domains, and genres of both vowelized and non-vowelized text ? • Research sub-questions: • Can richer lexical resources derived from dictionaries and grammar text books improve the coverage of morphological analysis for wider range of Arabic text formats, domains and genres? • How do we evaluate existing Part-of-Speech taggers and new Part-of-Speech tagger on a wider range of text formats, domains, genres, and vowelized and non-vowelized text? • How do I make the best reuse of existing tagger components and methods?

5. Introduction School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Tagging Applications • A good tagger can serve as a preprocessor. • Large tagged text corpora are used as data for linguistic studies. • Information technology applications; • Text indexing and retrieval. • Speech processing.

6. A word about Arabic Language School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Arabic language linguists classify words in Arabic into three main categories. • Verbs: that word which denotes an action and has tense. • Nouns: name of a person, place, or object and does not have any tense. • Particles: that word of which cannot be understood without joining a noun or a verb or both.

7. Verb الفعل Verb الفعل Verb الفعل Verb الفعل Verb الفعل Complete Verb فعل تام Complete Verb فعل تام Complete Verb فعل تام Complete Verb فعل تام Complete Verb فعل تام Incomplete Verb فعل ناقص Incomplete Verb فعل ناقص Incomplete Verb فعل ناقص Incomplete Verb فعل ناقص Incomplete Verb فعل ناقص Transitive Verb فعل متعدِّ Transitive Verb فعل متعدِّ Transitive Verb فعل متعدِّ Transitive Verb فعل متعدِّ Transitive Verb فعل متعدِّ Intransitive Verb فعل لازم Intransitive Verb فعل لازم Intransitive Verb فعل لازم Intransitive Verb فعل لازم Intransitive Verb فعل لازم Active Verb فعل معلوم Active Verb فعل معلوم Active Verb فعل معلوم Active Verb فعل معلوم Active Verb فعل معلوم Passive Verb فعل مجهول Passive Verb فعل مجهول Passive Verb فعل مجهول Passive Verb فعل مجهول Passive Verb فعل مجهول A word about Arabic Language School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING Verb classifications Verb الفعل Perfect / Past Verb الفعل الماضي Imperative Verb فعل أمر Progress Verb الفعل المضارع

8. A word about Arabic Language School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Nouns • Arabic language linguists distinguish between 21 types of nouns • Adjective • Increased present participle. • Comparing and contrasting entities, the comparative and the superlative • Adverb of place • Adverb of time • Noun of instrument • Proper noun • Noun of genus • Ordinal number nouns • Verb noun • The five nouns • Verbal noun • Original noun • Pronoun • Personal noun • Demonstrative noun • Joining nouns • Interrogative noun • Conditional noun • Generalization nouns • Adverb • Present participle • Past participle

9. Effects Verb Noun Both • Jussive • Subjunctive • Partial subjunctive • Genitive Case • Vocative • Exception • Conjunction A word about Arabic Language School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Particles Particles Meaning Particles Building Particles Inactive Particles Active Particles

10. Arabic Language Tagset School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Evaluating existing Arabic tagsets. • Every researcher has developed a tagset. Either detailed or minimal tagset. • A comparison of different tagsets will show • The number of tags used, • The purpose of using the tagset. • The source of information when designing the tagset. • The errors in classifying tags into their categories. • Designing a more reliable and multi-level tagset that varies from minimal tagset to more detailed one.

11. A word about Arabic Language School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Arabic Language challenges • Writing constraints lead to ambiguities. • Tokenization. • Agglutination. • Complex Morphology. • Vowel Marks. • Grammatical ambiguity • 2.8 in vowelized text and 5.6 in non-vowelized text

12. Tokenization School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • What is a token? • Main tokens are delimited by a white space or a punctuation mark • ( ، ؟؛ !. etc) . • Arabic Morphology allows words to be prefixed or suffixed with clitics. • Clitics can be concatenated one after the other. • Arabic clitics are not as easily recognizable. • A single word can comprise up to four independent morphemes. • Tokenizer is responsible for: • Defining word boundaries. • Demarcating clitics, multiword expressions, abbreviations and numbers. • Affixes carry morpho-syntactic features - Tense - Person - Gender - Number) • Clitics serve syntactic functions - Negation -Definition – Conjunction - Preposition

13. Tokenization Tokenization School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Most Arabic words consist of stem/root and a combination of prefixes and suffixes. • وَلِـيَـــكْـتُـبُــوُنَـهَـا [ wlyktbwnhA ] (And they write it) • وَ *لِ *يَ *كْتُبُ *وُنَ *هَا (w*l*y*ktb*wn*hA) 1- Root 2- Prefix(es) + Root 3- Root + Suffix(es) 4- Prefix(es) + Root + Suffix(es) 5- Stem 6- Prefix(es) + Stem 7- Stem + Suffix(es) 8- Prefix(es) + Stem + Suffix(es) كتب يكتب كتبه يكتبه كتاب الكتاب كتابهم وكتابهم ktb yktb ktbh yktbh ktAb AlktAb ktAbhm wktAbhm Wrote Write Wrote it Writing it Book The book Their book And their book

14. Vowels & Diacritical marks School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Arabic has 2 types of vowels • 1- Long vowels: Alif ا , waw و , yaa ي (part of Arabic letters) • 2- Short vowels: there small vowel marks which are not part of Arabic letters. These marks are placed above and below the Arabic letters. • Arabic has other 5 diacritical marks • Nunation is the doubling of the short vowels used at the end of indefinite nouns • Sukun (absence of a vowel) consonant is not followed by a vowel. • Gemination (Shadda) duplication of the consonant

15. Vowelization & Part-of-Speech Tagging School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Importance of using diacritics in Arabic language • Adding semantic information to the words • Determining the correct tag to the word in the sentence • Indicating grammatical functions to the word (Mood, Aspect, Voice endings for verbs, Case endings for nouns). • Indicating the correct pronunciation of word, correct syntactical analysis and removing the semantic confusion of Arabic readers.

16. Vowelization & Part-of-Speech Tagging School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Diacritical marks affect the Part-of-Speech tag of the word and its meaning

17. Corpora or (Corpuses) School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Corpus A collection of samples of texts that are selected and ordered according to explicit linguistic criteria in order to be used as a sample of the language. • Applications of Corpora • Prepare and format text to be used by search tools. • Useful for linguist, teacher and learner. (advanced level) • The study of syntactic structure. • Corpus in lexicography used for developing good dictionaries. • Used to train Machine Learning software for grammar analysis, word clustering, machine translation, …

18. Arabic Language Corpora School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Corpus of Contemporary Arabic (CCA) [University of Leeds Corpus](2004) • Engineered by Latifa Al-Sulaiti & Eric Atwell; Written and some spoken; Around 1M words; TAFL; Websites and online magazines • FREE to download: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/arabic • Buckwalter Arabic Corpus 1986-2003 • Written; 2.5 to 3 billion words, Lexicography;Public resources on the Web • An-Nahar Corpus (2001) • Written;140M words; General research; An-Nahar newspaper (Lebanon) • Al-Hayat Corpus (2002) • Written;18.6M words; Language Engineering and Information Retrieval; Al-Hayat newspaper (Lebanon) • Arabic Gigaword (2002) • Written; Around 400M words; Natual language processing, information retrieval, language modelling; Agence France Presse, Al-Hayat news agency, An-Nahar news agency, Xinhua news agency

19. Gold Standard Evaluation Corpus School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Building Gold Standard Evaluation Corpus • Different text domains, formats and genres of both vowelised and non-vowelised text. • TheQur’an. • Newspaper text. • Magazines. • School books. • Children’s books. • Blogs (text in blogs can be in Arabic script or in roman letters transcription) • Gold Standard will be checked by Arabic language scholars.

20. Gold Standard Evaluation Corpus School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING Sample of Qur’an Gold Standard (vowelized) Sample of Newspaper Gold Standard (non-vowelized) • Alif. Lam. Mim. Do men imagine that they will be left (at ease) because they say, We believe, and will not be tested with affliction? Lo! We tested those who were before them. Thus Allah knoweth those who are sincere, and knoweth those who feign. Or do those who do ill-deeds imagine that they can outstrip Us? Evil (for them) is that which they decide. Whoso looketh forward to the meeting with Allah (let him know that) Allah's reckoning is surely nigh, and He is the Hearer, the Knower. And whosoever striveth, striveth only for himself, for lo! Allah is altogether Independent of (His) creatures. And as for those who believe and do good works, We shall remit from them their evil deeds and shall repay them the best that they did. We have enjoined on man kindness to parents; but if they strive to make thee join with Me that of which thou hast no knowledge, then obey them not. Unto Me is your return and I shall tell you what ye used to do. And as for those who believe and do good works, We verily shall make them enter in among the righteous. • Globalization will stay a hot topic of discussion for a long time. In this article, we consider in depth some of the questions raised by new writers who consider globalization as a new lifestyle for the modern man. Taking the lead from America, many writers describe the multi-ethnic and multicultural American life style as the ideal in the new global village where telecommunication, transportation, information systems and the media shorten the distances between disparate groups. Advocates of this point of view look forward to a new modern man, the Cosmopolitan man.

21. Arabic Morphological Analysers and Stemmers School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Evaluating stemming and morphological analyzers. • A comparison of three stemming algorithms has been done. • Shereen Khoja Stemmer, Tim Buckwalter morphological analyzer and tri-literal root extraction algorithm. • Four different fair evaluation measurements were applied. • A combining by voting is used to combine results of different algorithms. • The paper shows that more work in this field is required as the stemming algorithms failed to achieve accuracy rates more that 75% (sawalha & Atwell, 2008).

22. Prior-Knowledge broad-lexical resource of Arabic Language School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • 15 Arabic language dictionaries* are used • The lexicon contains: • roots and single words. • Multi-word expressions. • Idioms. • Collocations requiring special part of speech assignment. • Words with special part of speech tags. • Meanings. I've seen it all..;) * Freely available from www.almeshkat.com in MS-Word format

23. Prior-Knowledge broad-lexical resource of Arabic Language School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING Lisan Al-Arab “ لسان العرب ” Arab tongue Taj Al-Arous min jawaher Al-Qamus “تاج العروس من جواهر القاموس ” Bride crown from the dictionaries jewels

24. Existing Arabic language Part-of-Speech taggers and reuse School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Evaluating existing Part-of-Speech tagger components. • Gold Standard • Fair measurements • Multi-level tagset • Analyzing & re-implementing algorithms of Part-of-Speech taggers. • Best tagger components need to be re-implemented, using Python. • Python will simplify the integration of the Part-of-Speech tagger to the NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit).

25. Hybrid Part-of-Speech tagger School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING • Novel algorithm leading to hybrid Part-of-Speech tagger for Arabic text which combines best components of existing taggers with novel resources and components. • Integrating best tagger components together • Integrating Prior-knowledge lexical resource • Integrating Morphological analyser • Using unsupervised learning algorithms to solve the problem of unknown words.

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